Re: Infinite loop in menus in sysinstall

On 11/17/07, Ben Kaduk <minimarmot_at_gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I finally broke down and pulled out the 7.0-beta2 iso for my dell inspiron 8500,
> but when I was at the part of the installation procedure to install the ports
> collection, it comes up with the message:
>
> Unable to get packages/INDEX file from selected media.
>
> This may be because the packages collection is not available
> on the distribution media you've chose, most likely an FTP site
> without the packages collection mirrored.  Please verify that
> your media, or your path to the media, is correct and try again.
>
> [OK]
>
>
> It is true that I am installing over ftp from ftp5.freebsd.org (which
> is only about
> five blocks away in the real world!), and it certainly seems to not have
> a 7-INDEX floating around, but that's not the main issue.
>
> When I select ``OK'', it seems to try again, and pops up the same message.
> It would be nice to have an option to back up in the menus and change
> something; at the moment, I broke to vt4 and installed the perl5.8 port
> so that I can build my own index file, but I don't know if this will break me
> out of my menu loop.
>
> No time to investigate and patch at the moment, as I'm trying to
> get the ppc beta iso to boot on the machine I'm typing this on,
> as I said I would test a couple things (I said this several months
> ago, and only rebooted once since then).
>
> Anyone else see this behavior?

Yes, in i386 5.x (5.0? 5.2? I forget which,) several years ago.  I
noticed it when I didn't have my router set up properly, so doing an
install over FTP wouldn't work.  The only way I could find to get out
of the loop was to restart the system, or fix the network.

-Mark C.